Posted - 2011.02.23 00:12:00 -
[31]
What the hell is the matter with you, everyone loves blobs, nothing is more fun that epic battles that work in super slo-mo lagging left, right, up, down, side to side.

--WIS/Incarna/Ambulation where microtransactions come to play, and uh bars.--

Why doesn't it happen in real life combat?Do you think in WW2 when 2 sides brought 100s of tanks each, all 100 tanks aimed and shot at single enemy tank and kept switching "primaries" till 1 side won?

Why do you think that didn't happen? it wasn't cause damage had stacking penalties.

That did happen in naval battles...

To a large degree, yes it did. Land battles, not so much for a very important reason.

Manoeuvre.

From the earliest days of warfare the primary goal of the man in charge was bringing as much of his firepower to bear on the enemy while restricting that enemy's ability to do the same. Technology evolved but this core doctrine remained the same, tactics evolving with the tech to do so.

The major consideration is where your forces are in relation to the enemy and how quickly they can move from one place to another.

Ships of the line (from when boats were made of wood and had a satisfyingly insane amount of guns strapped to them) sailed in lines simply so that they could all pour their fire into one target as they all passed it until it was gone, then pick on another. Simple, until you factor in the wind - it became a contest to see who could get the wind advantage (enabling them to pick their targets and stay on them while also allowing their own crippled ship the opportunity to drop from the line and retreat). Of course, someone (Sir George Rodney) ruined all that when he found it was loads of fun sailing his ships in between the spaces in the enemy line so that the broadsides passed down the entire length of the enemy ship instead of through both sides and out (messy) but it was a tactic that still relied on manoeuvre.

Once everyone had ships capable of moving independent of the wind and packing turreted guns capable of slinging frankly insane rounds across miles of sea then it got stuck in a period of everyone shooting one target at a time until it died and the people brining the most ships with the highest rate of fire and accuracy winning (until the aircraft carrier came along and cheap planes sank everyone's expensive battleships).

Manoeuvre and logistics in eve is incredibly, phenomenally easy. It's trivial to move pilots and assets across vast distances in very short periods of time, at all levels (jump drives and then warp drives for intra-system movement). Actual distance and speed means very little in large engagements (whilst intriguingly, meaning everything in solo/small gang actions).

Until there is a way of addressing this without making everyone rage the 'BIGGEST BLOB WINS' doctrine will usually bring success.

That said, in the biggest engagement there's still a lot of advantage, in theory at least, to the concept of Platoon Firing.

If 20 ships can alpha a target in one volley (they usually can't but you get the idea), why use 100? Using those 100 ships are broken down into 5 platoons, each with a separate target then the fleet doing so will kill five times faster than the fleet all firing at one target at a time.

I would also, in a perfect world, be interested in seeing something approaching suppressing fire come along, whereby taking fire yourself reduces your own effectiveness at dishing it out. If done well, you could have situations where the most dangerous targets are suppressed while you kill the weaker ones - at the moment suppression is the job of e-war ships (which is why they are primary - the concept works) but it's something that could be explored on a wider basis maybe?

I dunno, I'm throwing out a lot of stuff, most of which probably isn't helpful.

TL/DR: It's not the size of the wave, it's the motion of the ocean - or it should be at least, but it isn't :(

And for everyone knocking it, I want to know whether you've played other genres competitively

The main reason people are against it is cause it's counter-intuitive. It's just unnatural.

It also has some major flaws: what happens with supcap and POS bashing? suddenly they are a lot harder to kill - especially with the log out timer. The only way to effectively kill supercaps is to blob them with other supercaps

And how can damage stacking be calculated? weapons don't apply continuous damage, they apply instant damage at different time internals. The probability of 2 weapons hitting at exact same instant is very low, so virtually no weapons would be stacked.

Well yeah it is very "unnatural" or artificial, but within an artificial world, that's not really a great argument.

Every game has a huge amount of unexplainable artificiality. You get shot in Call of Duty, your gun flinches an inch (rather than knocking your character down). Fill in your own examples. Great developers add in artificial pros/cons to any given strategy so that PvP becomes a matter of high-level analytical thinking (in addition to the tactile skill involved, which can sometimes overcome poor planning).

The whole idea behind PvP, the underlying factor, is competitive fights. If you try to stack a team in Battlefield 2, the server will auto-balance the sides. If you try to queue up for a WoW arena with your entire guild, the game won't let you. I don't know why EVE players seem so unanimously unfamiliar (and repulsed) by this idea.

The specific details are irrelevant - we're not professional game designers here; none of these suggestions are going to be brilliant. The idea behind what he's proposing - that PvP should not be a matter of whose corp consists of the biggest poop-sockers - is vital to any competitive game. If you don't want a competitive game, you are all just carebears in disguise

For those unacquainted with the genius of Shawn Elliot: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=poop+socker

Posted - 2011.02.23 06:14:00 -
[39]
The line of sight idea I think would really solve a lot of the problems. If someone says "yeah well your big ships can't then attack tacklers without friendly fire" well.. yeah. You should have other small ships to counteract THEIR small ships, and those small ships wouldn't friendly fire much because they'd be closer to the tacklers. This would also bring an aspect to the game, namely formations, that would be very welcome. So when you lock a target and you have it selected to fire upon, you should see on your weaponry whether or not it will hit the target, or hit another target on the way to that target. Obviously some sort of notification that will change as you switch targets, indicating "There is line of sight to target" and "There is not line of sight to the target". Possibly it will include what ship/person the weapon will hit so you can move out of the way.

Anyways, this is wishful thinking, it will probably be a few years before the technology can allow this on a large scale, but it will offer a lot of new solutions to some tricky problems.

Posted - 2011.02.23 06:29:00 -
[40]
For years I've thought the solution to blobs and focused fire silliness (the poor bastard who's called primary and melted in 10 seconds sure isn't enjoying his EVE experience, is he?) was simply making a formula of maximum incoming damage based on signature radius. I don't know what the exact number would be (game devs would be able to come up with the precise formula), but something like:

Maximum incoming DPS to any ship = 300% of signature radius.

This means big, stupid blobs with no skill would lose out to disciplined fire teams who know how to spread their fire. If done right, it is also a not-so-stealth buff to active tanking (that's why the exact formula would have to be carefully crafted to not imbalance things the other way) and an additional nerf to MWDs (always a good thing, as CCP has continuously tried to encourage more AB use).

Originally by:Meridius DexThis means big, stupid blobs with no skill would lose out to disciplined fire teams who know how to spread their fire.

This is already the case.Take 100 vs 100 fight (all BS)Group A is operating as big dumb blob, one primary.Group B is operating in 4 fire teams of 25 BS each, one primary per fire team.

Group B will always win, it's simple maths. Say 10k alpha per BS, 250k EHP per BS.Group B instapops four BS per weapon cycle, group A instapops one BS per weapon cycle. 75% of group A's firepower is being wasted wasted.

Operating in fireteams and spreading fire also allows smaller fleets to destroy larger blob fleets, as the rate of ship loss is higher for the big dumb blob than it is for the fireteam.

No ridiculous 'damage cap' is necessary, all that is required is for people to use their brains.

Posted - 2011.02.23 07:22:00 -
[46]
I think an interesting fix would be to instead give solo pilots the power to come out even in a fight with a blob. What I mean by that is you can atleast trade ships. So if your flying a solo hurricane and you get blobbed a mechanic which gives you enough time to take down atleast another hostile ship. Obviously you will still die but you will have a chance to kill something.

For example, you jump into a system in your hurricane and waiting on the other side is an onyx, 2 drakes, rapier, and i dunno whatever else. You probably won't make it back to the gate, and you won't be able to burn away from them so what do you do? You pull a star trek and divert power from your engines to your shields for x amount of time (until your engines burn out). This gives you a hardened shield type effect which will hopefully give you enough time to take down one of your enemies.

Originally by:Jada MarooHow does it even make sense that more ships = less damage?

More ships still cause more Damage. 9 Ships will still cause more damage than 8.

What I mean is, make it so that a blob of 900 is no longer an autowin button.

Make it so that 1 ship = 100% damage, 2 Ships = 180% damage, 3 Ships = 260% damage etc. Tweak the formula (so maybe -10% every time) and we can actually go back to having a fun game to play.

soo... target your blues with noobships so that the enemy battleships get damage stack penalized into oblivion?

Disregard Noobships and have it based of class. So 10 Frigs are stack penalised seperatly and 10 BS are done seperately as well. Yes, it means that 10 frigs and 10 BS will do more damage than 20BS (maybe, not bothered to math it out) but OH NOES MIXED SHIP TIPES WHAT DO?

I kinda understand his logic on this. I'd prefer the stack penalty starting after 5 ships. So the 6th BS does .80 of max damage, the 7th does .60, with the maximum penalty of .20 damage after the 9th ship.

Course spider tanking would be impossible to break, or more accurately it would be too easy to switch and rep targets before they popped. And then CCP would have to rework the remote rep amounts and blah, blah...bleh.

Truth is its better not to mess with what works, no matter how much everyone (or almost everyone) hates the blob, and the lag that come with it.

Posted - 2011.02.23 08:02:00 -
[48]Edited by: DarkAegix on 23/02/2011 08:03:57If we imagine that lag were somehow fixed there would still be an issue with blobs.This is because of primaries being called, and your poor ship unluckily insta-popping.Just look at all the EVE trailers. They have many ships shooting other ones, not 1000 Drakes all firing a volley at a target.

I propose that there be a maximum to how many ships can target you. The larger your ship, the more enemies you can have firing, of course.But, issues arise when all ships in a single fleet target each other, and thus the entire fleet cannot be targeted. Or if many enemies are firing at you it'd be impossible to receive remote reps. This could be fixed by removing this limitation for logi ships, as well as ships in the same fleet.But then there's the problem where one fleet would split into two separate, friendly, fleets which completely lock up each other.

Originally by:Stuart Price(until the aircraft carrier came along and cheap planes sank everyone's expensive battleships)

That's just because they were nubbins and placed the battleship at A1{A4.

Quote:Until there is a way of addressing this without making everyone rage the 'BIGGEST BLOB WINS' doctrine will usually bring success.

`also, until there is a way to win space without bringing a blob, because that's the amount of ship it takes to kill a space-holding object in any reasonable amount of time.yyytIf you're not willing to fight for what you have in ≡v≡`you don't deserve it, and you will lose it.vy Karath Piki

Posted - 2011.02.23 10:18:00 -
[51]
The problem with your proposal is that it encourages you to bring the biggest ship possible so even more supercaps and whatever. People would be yelling on the comms for tacklers to stop firing. If you used drones you'd probably get kicked from the corp.There's something to be said about smaller ships taking a bigger one.

There's already a limit to how much firepower you should focus on one target, it's their EHP.

Posted - 2011.02.23 10:37:00 -
[52]
I wish I received a million isk every time someone pukes a poorly thought out and extremely harmful "idea" onto the forums. I'd be so rich in just one day, I could buy jita.

Originally by:BatolemaeusI wish I received a million isk every time someone pukes a poorly thought out and extremely harmful "idea" onto the forums. I'd be so rich in just one day, I could buy jita.

Buy. Jita.All of it.

Nah. Someone would just 0.01 your buy order, and you'd end up with Sobaseki instead.yyytIf you're not willing to fight for what you have in ≡v≡`you don't deserve it, and you will lose it.vy Karath Piki

Posted - 2011.02.23 13:05:00 -
[54]
Maneuvering and strategy has always placed importantly in any large scale engagement. Naval combat often included this via maneuvering into fog and mist to reduce direct visibility or generating smoke to do likewise.

Perhaps some form of LOS occlusion would help break up these blobfests? Nebulas/artificial static fields/Visual holography?

How about hologramatic decoys to artificially plump-up your apparent fleet size? or frigs trailing across swathes of target-blocking mines (targettable themselves so they can be removed in short order but providing short term cover). Any number of potential things could work in this.

That will stop blobs easily and turn the tides in battle, especially those blobs of motherships.

^^ Agreed this will blow the hell out of subcap fleets, but would not effect supercaps enough unless there was more dmg done to larger ships from the explosion. Your example of 32k dmg would make a supercap laugh...but I do like the concept. You wouldn't think explosions in space would cause 0 damage. Also need to figure out how bumping causes dmg in < .5...that would rock :D

Posted - 2011.02.23 14:32:00 -
[58]
SRY TO BURST YOUR BALLS KID, BUT THIS IS NOT YOUR ****TY WORLD OF WARCRAFT YOU'RE USE TO PLAY!! EVE IS MEANT TO BE LIKE THIS. IF YOU CANT STAND THEN STAY OUT OF THE MOTHER****ING FIRE KID!!

That will stop blobs easily and turn the tides in battle, especially those blobs of motherships.

^^ Agreed this will blow the hell out of subcap fleets, but would not effect supercaps enough unless there was more dmg done to larger ships from the explosion. Your example of 32k dmg would make a supercap laugh...but I do like the concept. You wouldn't think explosions in space would cause 0 damage. Also need to figure out how bumping causes dmg in < .5...that would rock :D

Posted - 2011.02.23 15:09:00 -
[60]
Honestly I don't think that damage would be as much as some of you think, sure for the biggest ships but remember the explosion happens, and spreads over an expanding sphere, so 1/r^2. It would add an interesting and computationally taxing effect to battles, as smaller ships could take quite a hit if too close, but I don't think it will be the "sci fi" movie effect many of you are thinking.

Some numbers are:The damage you take would be your cross sectional area times 1/r^2. In eve, I thin they would equate that to signature radius x 2 pi (just for estimation purposes)

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